Queen’s Speech update arrives 20 August

As we get closer to the first anniversary of Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has announced the first details of the next content update called The Queen’s Speech which is rumoured to contain a “major surprise”.

New Events

Developer Livestream – Take an inside look at the features in the release – 19th August

The Queen’s Speech – Don’t miss history in the making – Begins 20th August

The most exciting part of the update is that they’ve said this will bring the entire living story to-date together. Wooden Potatoes did a really, really cool video recently on what that might mean. Whatever happens it should at least be interesting; I’m rather enjoying the story lately despite the horrific start.

my problem with the LS is that the game doesn’t challenge the player to possibilities, when the QJ event started i already knew something would go wrong.
i really don’t know why Anet is doing this but they give no space whatsoever for the more daily life stuff, if they just ones made an event without something going wrong it would be a new thing in GW2.

for now we can enjoy hordes of battles and events being ruined trough attacks, the wait for some simple fun events is a long one if this keeps up.

centaurs: kill all humans and burn villages to the ground.
flame legion: make special war machines and send the most deadly flame shamans to lay waste to any heretic.
nightmare court: throw paint at advertisement posters and make funny faces on photo’s.

Worst start for an LS event after the massive lag event involving Karka in LA.

Yes, I am serious.

You go to DR and witness the closing ceremony. The cut scene felt out of place and was not as well done as the “Margery” one in the bar. It just does not fit the rest of the painterly style we had up till now.
The Asuran engineer sends you to Gendarran Fields, where the “pointing to tasks” is not working as it should. No message in the upper right corner. He said you should go to Ascalon Settlement and “oh, there is a golden star on the map”. A witness sends you somewhere else (no spoilers). World event says “go to Harathi”. There I ran around all messages gone. I zoned to Fireheart after my guildies told me “world events visible in LA” point not only to Harathi but to Fireheart as well. In Fireheart you get a message “to return to you homeworld” – Overflow is somehow broken.
After returning LA there seems to be action in Blazeridge, so you go there and get to an overflow that seems to work. Now one hour of random zerging starts which made German blobbing WvW servers like AM look like a small party. We failed the event to kill Scarlett by perhaps one minute (I think), we still got some loot bags (no rares though) but I still have 1/13 Portal events but my guildie on the same map has 0/13.

After looking at the second LS tab (with the Asura) I see I have 3/5 on the progression of tasks, my guildie has 0/5.
Selling all those green items (I got one rare, which salvaged into no ectos). I though about the story…

Scarlett is a Sylvari, which seems to hate the Queen and probably the rest of Tyria. But why? She uses Inquest tech (force field platform) and Aetherblade rifle. New kind of mechanized creatures fight for her. Some sort of Steamcreatures 2.0.
Logan has no clue, Anis seems to be informed about an attack. The Asuran representative now tells that Scarlett graduated from all the colleges in Rata Sum and seems to be some sort of scientific genius. Oh really? Nobody saw that connection for months and now a random new NPC tells us about her?
Scarlet has super portal devices and a larger attack force than the Pact to invade random locations throughout Tyria. Now it does not really matter we drove the Molten Alliance back in the past and blew up their facilities. It does not matter we found and cleared secret Aetherblade ports and maintenance sites. The forces of Scarlett are stronger than ever.

Haven’t done any of the emissary LS quests yet, so I cannot comment on how they are broken or not.

I did however participate in the first three invasions (2 successful, 1 unsuccessful). First of all, I love the idea to transform a whole random map into a huge “world-event” for everyone (and the overflow system actually works) fighting together. Also, with culling removed, it really gives some sort of epic feeling to it that I’ve missed in the game so far.

So much for the theory.

From a practical point of view, people have to learn to actually split into smaller groups to do as many events as fast as possible, as the timer is rather short for a successful completion. Stuff like 3 commanders stacking up on each others and dragging a 100 ppl zerg after them is a complete waste of resources and time. People in map-chat spaming for “where is the zerg” is a sad proof of how the general player has degenerated to a mindless zerg-mentality. I surely hope this will improve over the course of the next few days.

The good news is that you get a reward for both completing or failing the three invader waves, with the reward for failing not being that much lower. You just won’t get a shot at “killing” Scarlet (achievement, extra loot). A word on that though, her HP bar is far far too low and with that many people on the map it’s a matter of luck to be fast enough to reach her in time to get credit for the kill. Duh, nothing learned from the champ-farming? :undecided:

All in all, a decent approach to re-populating open-world zones, I suppose the event-chain as such does get boring rather fast though and I doubt I’ll be playing them past the achievements.

Worst start for an LS event after the massive lag event involving Karka in LA.
Yes, I am serious.

I don't agree. The second southsun was way worse.

In Fireheart you get a message "to return to you homeworld" - Overflow is somehow broken.

I got that message at my homeserver and yes, it seems to be broken. That you got that message in overflow means that the overflow was created more than 10 minutes after the event started.

After returning LA there seems to be action in Blazeridge, so you go there and get to an overflow that seems to work. Now one hour of random zerging starts which made German blobbing WvW servers like AM look like a small party. We failed the event to kill Scarlett by perhaps one minute (I think), we still got some loot bags (no rares though) but I still have 1/13 Portal events but my guildie on the same map has 0/13.

We missed by about 10 seconds, I thing. And the event to kill Scarlet has nothing to do with that failed event. Because we did kill Scarlet (even got a gold reward on that one). I still find it weird though, that I didn't get 1/13 on the portal events. I later went to Frostgorge, caught the last 5 minutes or so on the event going on there, we failed it (not even close) and I did get the achievement updated... Strange...

I did however participate in the first three invasions (2 successful, 1 unsuccessful). First of all, I love the idea to transform a whole random map into a huge "world-event" for everyone (and the overflow system actually works) fighting together. Also, with culling removed, it really gives some sort of epic feeling to it that I've missed in the game so far.
So much for the theory.
From a practical point of view, people have to learn to actually split into smaller groups to do as many events as fast as possible, as the timer is rather short for a successful completion. Stuff like 3 commanders stacking up on each others and dragging a 100 ppl zerg after them is a complete waste of resources and time. People in map-chat spaming for "where is the zerg" is a sad proof of how the general player has degenerated to a mindless zerg-mentality. I surely hope this will improve over the course of the next few days.

It's a nice way to teach people the failure of one big zerg... I think as time progresses and people start to understand what's going on, that we'll see a split of groups. Even yesterday, whenever somebody asked for the zerg, they got reminded that we needed more groups instead of just one big one.

It's a nice way to teach people the failure of one big zerg... I think as time progresses and people start to understand what's going on, that we'll see a split of groups. Even yesterday, whenever somebody asked for the zerg, they got reminded that we needed more groups instead of just one big one.

It’s more like people will read the guide on dulfy’s and then split up because it says so. Some players were indeed trying to give good advise on map-chat, but it largely got ignored because others still preferred to hug the (useless) balled-up commanders instead. Sometimes I question if people actually read. Like players spaming map-chat about where to go for the emissary-achivements even though it says so in the description…

But true, it’s a nice way to teach the failure of a zerg and I’m quite pleased that the event works the way it does.

It's more like people will read the guide on dulfy's and then split up because it says so. Some players were indeed trying to give good advise on map-chat, but it largely got ignored because others still preferred to hug the (useless) balled-up commanders instead. Sometimes I question if people actually read anything outside a guide. Like players spaming map-chat about where to go for the emissary-achivements even though it says so in the description...
But true, it's a nice way to teach the failure of a zerg and I'm quite pleased that the event works the way it does.

This morning I was in Frostgorge and one experienced WvW commander from AG asked the "PvE commanders" a lot to flag off their icons because we did not spread out enough. In the end we failed.
TBH, I don't think I have the nerves to do perhaps two maps a day. It feels very grindy. I still think it is one of the not so good updates. Perhaps I am the only one that liked the slow pace of the first F&F chapter.

Nicely presented, but long and repetitive. In a way, it reminds me of the Claw of Jormag fight. First time “wow…”, second time “I know how this works” and by the third time it’s simply “are we there yet…”. I fully expect players to just /afk their way to the global reward and not care too much for the overall outcome (success or failure).

Maybe less overall attendance/participation over time will help the chance of success though. Fewer zergs also means that the events themselves don’t scale insanely anymore. I’ve closed several portals in rather short time with just 4-5 players being present.

Maybe less overall attendance/participation over time will help the chance of success though. Fewer zergs also means that the events themselves don't scale insanely anymore. I've closed several portals in rather short time with just 4-5 players being present.

Yes, that’s why I usually ignore the new LS updates for at least until the first weekend… But I have some guildies who love to talk about the LS stories, rewards, etc, on guild chat…. So, this time I decided to look at it on the first day, so they wouldn’t ruin the surprise for me. I won’t do it next time!

Lots of good stuff for this release and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything. The downside is there isn’t really anything to do now. The events take too long to do them routinely, and the end dungeon is incredibly easy. I haven’t gotten all the achievements or the mini or whatever it is they want to reward us with that I never care about, but I would be ok if they said “time’s up!” and started the next chapter tomorrow.

I played an hour this morning, and manage to get a bunch of achievements done while not really knowing what I was supposed to do… All I did is go do a bit of the story part, then go do a bunch of events in Maelstrom for a while.

Since I’m actually enjoying the group play, I’m pretty sure I’ll be completing this… unlike Gauntlet which is still missing quite a bit.

I don’t even know what the achievements for the portals were, they just automatically completed before I got a chance to look them over. The may have made them a liiiitle too easy to accomplish. Maybe a few non-required like “defeat the invasion in 20 minutes” or something would add some more fun.

Fixed a bug that prevented some player characters from receiving their First Birthday Gift. This should also give a birthday gift to all characters that are over a year old, including those that have already received one.
Changed the amount of PvP glory gained when using the Birthday Booster to match the booster’s description.

General

The /age command now returns the number of days since your current character’s creation instead of the number of months.
Fixed a server crash.

Those of you that didn’t receive a gift yet while they should have, this was a bug and has been resolved.

I personally am happy with the /age update. This makes it a lot easier to figure out when your character was created.